Cloud computing is at the forefront for many organizations across the world. Experts believe it is the future of IT. Considering all the benefits offered by the cloud, making the transition may appear inevitable to enterprises. But just like any major technology, it also comes with cer...

Enterprise IT organizations are under increasing pressure to do more with less. As such, they are highly motivated to leverage existing investments for maximum efficiencies rather than spend time and resources on acquiring, integrating and managing pricey new equipment. Enterprises are...

In many contexts, Cloud isn’t the solution. It’s part of the answer, and whether the money should go to Cloud or to some alternative will depend on the nature of the problem.
We know we want it, so Cloud must be a thing, right? If we’re carrying our enterprise IT shopping basket arou...

Employee benefits provider Unum Group has been building a DevOps continuum, and is further exploring the benefits of a better process around cloud-assisted applications development and deployment.
This interview highlights how employee benefits provider Unum Group has been building a ...

When you haven't got time to cook a meal there really is nothing like the convenience of picking up the phone and dialing for a home delivery kebab. You go online choose the meal deal you want and 30 minutes later there's a ring at your doorbell. So when one of our customers asked if V...

A middle-of-the-road solution between dedicated servers and shared hosting is a balance that makes a lot of sense for many businesses. Such a service exists and is called a virtual private server (or VPS). VPS offers webmasters a way to host their own server, but without the higher cos...

The latest reports surrounding the surveillance programs of the NSA and their International counterparts reveal that these agencies have been able to decode the encryption methods some enterprises and organizations use to keep their online data private.
While these headlines are likel...

I see digital transformation spinning off many different business trends and technology waves. Consumers want to consume media on mobile devices. This in turn drives tablet sales, as most media is easier to view on tablets. Tablets and other mobile devices encourage and promote the d...

Maintaining email servers is a full-time job including server maintenance, filtering spam, blocking viruses, and creating backups. A hosted Exchange service frees up IT time by putting all of these tasks in the hands of the email host. Even still, the myths surrounding hosted Exchange ...

Recently, one of our customers, let’s call him PointInFact, had a very typical problem. After deploying a new version of its software, some user requests degraded horribly. Requests that should have taken half a second took up to a minute. Interestingly, the PointInFact team runs a mul...

For many enterprises, moving business processes and data to the cloud has become a next step for improving both operational and technological capabilities. The cost savings and efficiencies created by utilizing cloud applications continue to increase, including opportunities for more b...

A recent article by Rob Livingstone on CFO.com [1] attracted my attention. In the article, Rob talks about the need for a tighter, ongoing working relationship between your company and its IT vendors for “as-a-service” technology-delivery models. We have in previous blogs also discusse...

Anytime we in IT encounter a new paradigm, our natural reaction is block, control, stop. In many shops, our first response is to prohibit users from accessing websites that the company has not approved, including cloud-based software, mobile applications, and other “bring your own apps...

The bottom line for the telcos is that Cloud-based offerings are value-added services, where the value they add is added to the plumbing. In other words, their fundamental cultural perspective is to make more money with the telecommunications infrastructure. The problem with this persp...

When cloud computing started to materialize we learned the benefits of matching workloads to the IT resources but what customer problem prompted the need for cloud computing? This one...
In 2005, I was working at Hewlett Packard in the storage group. We were three years past the Compa...

Why should enterprises move data and applications into the cloud? The discussion on cloud strategy is still to this day focused on cost-reduction, primarily featuring economies achieved in infrastructure, platform and even applications. Certainly no one is going to argue that this is a...

The major retailer BCBG migrated to a cloud security platform and discovered the CloudAccess'SIEM and Log Management capabilities enhanced their abilities for enterprise security.
There was a time the only security issues retailers needed to be concerned with was theft. Put a guard in...

Cloud services have really captured the imagination. According to a Gartner survey 71% of organizations have adopted SaaS (Software as a Service) within the last three years. Quality Assurance teams, however, seem to have missed the boat, barely leveraging the benefits of the cloud. Wh...

Users need to focus upon cost, security, and availability to reap full cloud benefits. This article, part 3 in a series, present key aspects of availability monitoring.
While cost brings people to the cloud, agility and availability keep them using. For sophisticated users, AWS (and...

New reports show that when the NSA was conducting its surveillance programs, perhaps including XKeyscore and PRISM, the agency was not following its own legal guidelines. These reports, based on internal NSA audit reports leaked via the “Snowden leak”, showing the NSA violated its own ...

Business are adding innovation as a core component of their strategy.
With an historic transition underway to an information-based economy, organizations are increasingly investing in innovation. While disruptions across industries have happened for a long time, the recent capability ...

ARM-based Servers are poised to shake up the traditional Server market. This will also shake up the software market – creating opportunity for new vendors who choose to specialize in delivering solutions for this emerging computing platform.
"There's a new class of technologies poise...

When Melrose transitioned from nearly 100 percent server virtualization to a novel cloud capability built on VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, they discovered that they could not only host their own applications, but also those of nearby communities for an ongoing fee.

Part of 1 of a 3 part series outlining the essential components for effective cloud monitoring. This portion covers cost monitoring and presents 3 key issues that users need to address to maximize their ROI.
Cloud elasticity delivers significant increases in availability and scalabil...

Some businesses today are nervous about moving to cloud-delivered technology because it means allowing their system data to reside somewhere other than their own data center. For some, this can be a tough concept to grasp, especially for those who have spent 25 years or more hosting th...

I took inventory of my personal SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) environment this morning while sitting in a coffee shop next to the Boise river. On Tuesday I recorded and published my first Google+ Hangout On Air. I interviewed mobility expert Bob Egan using our MacBook Pr...

Having made it past the 2013 midpoint, it’s time for technology-driven and/or technology-enabled organizations to evaluate plans and review outcomes so far, look at what has changed in the industry or business landscape; and realign for what the rest of the year has to offer.
Here are...

With recent revelations about NSA surveillance programs including PRISM and now XKeyscore, many organizations are concerned about the privacy of customer data and other sensitive business information being put on the cloud. Some are predicting that the public uncovering of these progra...

The prevalence of social media and the power of mobile have quickly turned the business world into a customer-centric one. Sure, there have always been companies devoted to excellent customer service. However, today’s engaged consumer expects all businesses to master customer experienc...

With customer expecting information technology to be delivered with new models, systems integrators have to quickly transform themselves to meet these needs.
Over the past few months, I have interacted with several organizations that are evaluating changes to their business model to a...

CIOs are expected to be heroes. They are responsible for innovating and transforming IT using new technologies that will drive business initiatives forward, but that is far from an easy task given the ongoing evolution of the IT world. This article will discuss the case for hybrid clou...

Oligopoly: A market form in which a market or industry is dominated by a small number of sellers.[1] Its parallel in political science, oligarchy, translates to power effectively resting with a small number of people.[2]
A recent Forbes article entitled – “Cloud Computing Market May B...

Cloud computing, developed more than eight years ago, has become a multi-billion dollar segment of the IT services market. However, the original server-centric model, used to provide low cost computing, is giving way to a new network-centric model that will deliver better performance a...

All too often organizations start with an answer while being unclear on what the question is. Case in point: the US government’s Cloud First initiative. Originally part of former Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s 25-Point Plan to Reform Federal IT Management, Cloud First called for government...

Today four converging IT trends are changing the IT paradigm and will forever change the way businesses communicate, collaborate, store and manage information. Each on its own would have significant impact without the others. However, combined together, they are a disruptive force.
T...

In the last MetraTech blog, we explored the topic of how you price for cloud and other services. In this blog, we focus on the everything-as-a-service (XaaS) movement and the impact on current pricing and business models. While the cloud industry is heavily impacted by this trend, it i...

Enterprise organizations are bombarded daily with the myriad reasons to deploy their line of business applications in the cloud. Efficiency, flexibility, cost savings, agility – and the list goes on and on – are just some of the benefits exhorted by cloud computing supporters. And indu...

In the last five years, organizations have increasingly embraced cloud applications to help them innovate and transform their business. Applications that automate sales processes, HR management, collaboration, email and file sharing are growing fast and enabling organizations to meet t...

When I was asked about innovation, the first thing I did was review my research to get an idea of what my peers in the industry were predicting for our parallel IT futures. Not surprisingly, they all reflected the same sentiment: the cloud is growing, and employees will continue to bri...

Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.